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For decades to come the spy world will continue to be the collective couch where the subconscious of each nation is confessed.

John le Carre

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John le Carre
Age: 89 †
Born: 1931
Born: October 19
Died: 2020
Died: December 12
Actor
Film Producer
Novelist
Screenwriter
Spy
Writer
Sweetwater
Texas
David John Moore Cornwell
David Cornwell
John le Carre
Come
Couches
World
Subconscious
Collectives
Collective
Decades
Continue
Confessed
Nation
Spy
Nations
Couch

More quotes by John le Carre

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It's the oldest question of all, George. Who can spy on the spies?
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Most people like to read about intrigue and spies. I hope to provide a metaphor for the average reader's daily life. Most of us live in a slightly conspiratorial relationship with our employer and perhaps with our marriage.
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Home's where you go when you run out of homes.
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It struck him as a bit unfair that, at the age of eight, he should have manifested the same sense of solitude that haunted him at forty-three.
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The monsters of our childhood do not fade away, neither are they ever wholly monstrous. But neither, in my experience, do we ever reach a plane of detachment regarding our parents, however wise and old we may become. To pretend otherwise is to cheat.
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All power corrupts but some must govern.
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The fact that you can only do a little is no excuse for doing nothing.
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I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.
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I taught principally German language and literature at Eton. But any master with private pupils must be prepared to teach anything they ask for. That can be as diverse as the early paintings of Salvador Dali or how bumblebees manage to fly.
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Smiley was soaked to the skin and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London.
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What do you think spies are: priests, saints and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes pansies, sadists and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives.
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Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.
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On one hand we go like hell for every terror cell we can find, we penetrate it, we destroy it. On the other hand, there is a much bigger need for a political solution.
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I've got more than one string to my bow, and I thought I'd give this one a twang.
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A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
John le Carre
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I grew up in a completely bookless household. It was my father's boast that he had never read a book from end to end.
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I was quite able at the insignificant work I did in MI6, but absolutely dysfunctional in my domestic life. I had no experience of fatherhood. I had no example of marital bliss or the family unit.
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When a problem threatens to engulf you, there's nothing like irrelevant detail to keep your head above water.
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When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly it's just the beginning.
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Love means having something to betray.
John le Carre